Flash fiction project: one dark story per day, all the way through October, each one based on one normal thing gone wrong. More of this year’s stories here. You can find last year’s stories here, or at Amazon as October Nights.

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Normal thing: Finding money I forgot about

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THE COIN

She was vacuuming, and because the cat hair had built up so much around the edge of the room, she pulled out that little tool on the back of the vacuum cleaner, the wand, and stuck the edger attachment on it. Vrrrup! went the cat hair, which was a gray haze around the edges of the room, even though the cat itself was black.

She looked at the couch and thought, I should do the couch too.

There was a fabric attachment for the vacuum wand, but she didn’t use it, it seemed like it would be breaking the spell that was allowing her to clean, suddenly she would turn into a pumpkin and go back to her normal work-from-home self, only worse, with no deadlines, no money in her savings account, and no health insurance. Cleaning was better than worrying. The small attachment seemed to take forever to vacuum the arms, the back, the ruffles along the bottom, the tops of the cushions.

She shoved the cushions onto the floor and flipped them over to vacuum the bottoms. The tops were getting a bit worn; she should just put the cushions back upside-down. Then she decided to vacuum the crevices, the hidden places of the couch, which they hadn’t bothered to upholster in nice fabric, only a thin cotton sheet that sagged on the bottoms.

A coin lay there. She picked it up, carried it over to the kitchen counter, and put it down with a clunk. The coin was dull gray, very heavy, heavier than the genuine silver dollar she still had in her flat under-the-bed box of mementos. It was more like putting down a paperweight than it was like putting down a coin.

The vacuum cleaner was still running. She walked over to it, picked up the wand, and began to run the tip over the sheer under-couch fabric.

There was another coin, right where the first had been. It must have slid down.

She picked it up, carried it over to the counter, and laid it beside the first. Where the first should have been, that was. There was no other coin.

Where had it gone?

She picked it up, turned it on its edge, and tapped it against the counter. The vacuum cleaner was still running. She looked over to the couch, still holding the coin. There was no coin on the fabric; she must be getting paranoid.

She put the coin in her pocket and picked up the wand. She ran the tip over the fabric. A few seconds later, a coin slid out of the crevice along the back of the couch and came to a stop where the first coin had been.

She reached into her pocket, which still felt heavy. But the coin was gone. Aha.

The vacuum cleaner was still running.

She picked up the coin again. It wasn’t a quarter, it wasn’t a half-dollar, it wasn’t a silver dollar. She wasn’t even sure it was made of metal. The flat gray surface didn’t look like, not quite like, silver or nickel or even pot metal, like the cheap dangly earrings she used to buy as a teenager. The face on the front wasn’t recognizable. It was a woman’s face. The letters themselves were familiar, but the language wasn’t; she couldn’t read a word of it, front or back. The obverse held a picture of a monument, or a temple, at which some other people came to worship.

She held the coin in her left hand while she reached for the wand with her right. She watched the coin, not the wand. She really kept her eye on it. As she vacuumed, the coin turned hot in her hand, so hot that she dropped it.

Before it could hit the floor, it vanished. And reappeared, sliding out of the back of the couch crevice, sliding neatly into place.

What if she just left it there? The thought rankled. She might be able to look it up and sell it on Ebay, no matter where it was from, make a few extra bucks until she got her next client. But, on the other hand, she could just leave the coin there, turn off the vacuum, and be done with it. She imagined herself suddenly trapped in a loop: the vacuum running continuously, the coin appearing and disappearing, and each time the woman’s expressionless face looking off to her left, as though she were watching something just around the corner, something terrible, just out of sight.